This from Ms. Hannah Rhea’s post about Studying and Treating Schizophrenia Using Virtual Reality: A New Paradigm by Daniel Freeman of Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8AF, UK.

This study is all about solving or some kind of treating a person suffering from Schizophrenia. A new study was found that it would be effective or a good way of curing Schizophrenia disease if the person that are infected or suffering will be put into a place called Virtual Reality. It had been proven that through this method, curing such illness will be faster.

But first of all, let us define or know what this Schizophrenia disease is all about. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorders characterized by distortions of reality and disturbances of thought and language and withdrawal from social contact. Individuals with this disorder may develop significant loss of interest or pleasure. Likewise, some may develop mood abnormalities. This disorder, at some point in the illness, involves a psychotic phase with delusions, hallucinations, or grossly bizarre/disorganized speech and behavior. This study is all about treating schizophrenia using virtual reality. What do we mean when we say virtual reality? Virtual reality an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. Virtual reality is primarily experienced through two of the five senses: sight and sound.

This study aims to use virtual reality to create a new environment for the patient suffering from Schizophrenia disease wherein they can communicate, and act in a simulated environment. It has been studied that it would be hard to personally deal with this kind of people and putting them into virtual reality environment would be a very good solution. Virtual reality has the ability to present social environment that would trigger for the patients to response equivalent to the real world. So the main point of it is its interaction to the social world.

There are three applications in using Virtual reality dovetails with the emerging cognitive-behavioral interventions for psychosis. An educational component could teach individuals about the factors that make symptoms better or worse. For example, one could demonstrate how emotional state affects hallucinations by having the individual enter Virtual Reality after a mood manipulation (up or down). Similar practical exercises could help individuals learn about the effects of cognitive processes such as focus of attention or style of reasoning. The second use would follow that developed for anxiety disorders: exposure to persecutory fears. The alternative way to frame this is as behavioral experiments testing out the threat beliefs. Hierarchical tests of fears could be presented using virtual environments. Virtual Reality experiments are likely to feel safer and easier to the patient than tests of fears in real life and could precede them. The third use of Virtual Reality for psychosis would be learning to cope with symptoms as they occur. A variety of coping strategies could be tried out for learning how to remain engaged in a social situation even when symptoms occur. Clinical studies of these techniques in psychosis are yet to be carried out. Virtual Reality has, however, been used in rehabilitation interventions for a range of problems including schizophrenia.

However, there are also disadvantages or side effects in using virtual reality. Side effects of virtual reality in individuals with psychosis will need to be monitored. The main concern is simulator sickness, which includes dizziness, nausea, headache, and eyestrain. Also, it is inadvisable to test individuals who have seizures when watching television or playing video games. In the author’s studies with members of the general population and individuals with persecutory delusions. Side effects will relate to the specific equipment used, the scenario, and the length of immersion and should be routinely monitored. In relation to psychosis, the incorporation of virtual reality into delusional systems needs consideration. In the author’s work, paranoid comments about the equipment have been rare, perhaps because participants have provided informed consent to participate. The most common comments from patients are about their enjoyment of the experience and appreciation of the opportunity to try a new technology. This bodes very well for the future applications of virtual reality to psychosis set out in this article.

This study as overall will be very beneficial and helpful to treat people who are suffering from Schizophrenia disease. It presents a good social environment that would make the patients to response equivalent to the real world. In such a way, we will not be having very much trouble in dealing them and in the same way; they will not be affected by our own mood on how we deal them. However, just as there is yin and there is yang, dark and light, boy and girl, there is also a corresponding disadvantage to this application no matter how great it had been. These disadvantages are being mentioned above. Maybe the best thing to do is to balance and analyze what which is better and the benefits that we can get if we will use or not use that certain application. What weighs most is the better one.

I am going to review Ms. Adarna’s entry. Ms. Adarna reviewed three research papers and I can say that she did follow the concept of “varying quality” as she also reviewed a sociological paper rather than those focusing on technical matters.

Given that she only given a snapshot of the research studies mentioned above, I skimmed through the whole paper myself to gain more understanding of why it was done, how was it done and what was the outcome. Such action is important not only in reviewing documents but also to gain more knowledge in how to write my own research paper. In fact, its quite obvious that this task was given to us so as to observe and learn the important parts of writing a research paper of which we are to produce this semester.

Going back to Ms. Adarna’s entry, the first topic she assessed was the Faith in treatment influences efficacy among AIDS patients. The study was made determine the extent to which patients' faith in a treatment influences its effectiveness. To get the data needed for the study, one hundred forty men, requesting for an alternative therapy for AIDS, consisting of repeated injections of typhoid vaccine, were enrolled in a treatment program by a San Francisco AIDS Clinic and also agreed to participate in this independent study of other factors which might affect treatment efficacy. Patients were interviewed before entry into the protocol and at intervals of every 2 months for two years while in the protocol. The patient's "faith in treatment" was assessed at each contact. Clinic physicians made weekly ratings of the patients' sense of subjective improvement. CD4 cell count and white blood cell count were measured regularly.

At then end of the observation it was found that faith in treatment was associated with treatment efficiency. A fall in "faith in treatment" among those who initially responded very positively to the vaccine preceded by 4-6 months the development of a life-threatening infection and deterioration in clinical course. The ten patients who continued to respond to the vaccine at the end of one year and two years were those who continued to have a high "faith in treatment."

It was concluded that an effect of faith in treatment upon the course of AIDS was demonstrated. Faith may be important regardless of the efficacy of a treatment and may be the mediating variable which renders statistically ineffective treatments highly effective for those who believe in them. Since we were asked to review the topics given, I hope my “personal reaction” to the study would be an accepted reply. Well, I believe in the findings of the study. How many people whose lives were endangered or already hung on a balance between life and death due to these chronic illnesses have survived and shared their love for God. God loving and trusting people do get well or feel better after talking to God. People who are suffering from illness renew their connections to God or make their bond with God more closely and this gives them the energy to fight for life that our Mighty Father has endowed all of us. When with God, giving up is visible, hence people tend to fight for life and leave everything to God. In some cases, people can get cured and yet they are ones who let themselves down, thinking that it would be impossible. It is with this kind of people where placebos are an alternative. Placebos are like faith. You give “sick” people faith, and hope and they will fight and positivity will reign. Being positive gives people power to cure themselves and dust themselves off. The study above has a nice topic since it shows results that people/hospitals can use to cure patients. It is very valuable for the people and the environment.

The second topic is, eWatch: A Wearable Sensor and Notification Platform. The idea behind it is already creative and fun since it gives attention to creating wearable computing. The eWatch needs to be small and energy efficient enough to allow for multiple day user studies by non-technical participants. Given these energy and size constraints eWatch should provide the most computation and flexibility to allow an assortment of applications. The goal was to move beyond simple sensor logging and allow for online analysis that could query the user for feedback while collecting data or provide services to showcase context aware applications.

As I read through the paper, I found the features being embed in this device. eWatch can be used for applications such as context aware notification, elderly monitoring and fall detection, wrist PDA, or a universal interface to smart environments. The ability to sense and notify allows for a new variety of enhancements. For instance, much work has been done on fall detection for the elderly. Existing systems do not function appropriately when a patient loses consciousness and cannot press a button. Current automatic systems have a high rate of false positives. An eWatch system could sense if the user was in distress and then query to confirm that it is an emergency. If the user does not respond, then the eWatch could use its networked abilities to call for help. The use of online learning could profile a patient’s daily activity and notify a caretaker if a patient no longer performs their daily routines. The eWatch can also notify a patient when they should take certain medication.

I actually seen infomercials about some products that can be considered as “relatives” to this idea/product such as the bra that can sense if the user is in trouble base on her heart rate and the shoe that can count how far the runner has ran. For the bra, if her heart rate decline or pumps faster than normal then the sensor will send a signal of distress to the phone lines already given by the owner beforehand. All of these technology are pretty useful since its simple and yet very useful for the one who is using it. Its like buying one object and actually getting two or more objects in return thus investing in these kinds of technology isn’t wasteful.

For both papers, the methodologies they used were correct (if I can say so, basing from the data they gathered from those methodologies), their topic were very interesting and the same time is useful directly to the user and to the environment. As for the paper construction, I can’t find anything wrong. Maybe because I am not really good at reviewing such documents or that these documents are really done well (given that they were published). As for references, I think it was already sufficient (if ten references are already enough for you..^^). Overall, the paper construction to those of these two papers is a bit different from what we were told to do. However, we have a different focus, or target audience that is why ours would be made a bit more detailed and at some parts lacking. Anyways, I hope we can finish our paper on time. ^^

My preferred topic among the three articles is “Before You Call a Web Developer, Ask Yourself One Question” by Susan Daffron.

“Because we develop Web sites, not surprisingly, the first words we often hear from people are: "I need a Web site." My response is often "why?" The answer to that question can be quite telling. I can almost guarantee that you won't end up with a good Web site if you don't even know why you need one in the first place.” By this statement she clarifies the importance of knowing what you will do. We need to know what really our objectives and goals before making our own sites. By doing this we can benefit for it, and to keep going to it without any hesitations and confusions. Some people often disregard this question or not knowing the importance of it and they will end up easily because of the unbeneficial site. They are wasting their money investing for nothing. “Lots of people waste their time and money on useless websites. The thing is that the website you will be developing should be well treated like business or marketing expenditure. For example, suppose you sell dog treats. You spend a bunch of money printing a brochure that explains why your dog treats are healthier or tastier than the ones at the grocery store. The goal for that brochure is to give people information on all the fabulous benefits of your special dog treats.” She added.

The next topic should be appropriate to the previous one since after you have determined your goals and objectives you can now know how to make use of it. Financially or just an information web site you can know describe how your website gonna be.

This topic “Making Money with Articles: Niche Websites” by Jo Han Mok describes how are you going to make use of your web sites. By choosing a good place subject to base your website is one of the most important aspects of making money off of your articles. You should take each one of these keywords and use it for the basis of one article on each page. This way, even though you are targeting one specific subject, you will be sure to interest a wide variety of people in that one niche.

“The best way to find keywords for your subject is to use a keyword software program. This will generate a list of keywords or phrases that contain your place and will also show you approximately how many people search for each word or phrase. By this you can recognize the articles on which most people preferred. If there are a number of topics that you like, pick the one that you feel would be easiest to start with and then, once that site is built and generating some revenue, you can start another site.” We should select the best name for our websites. Simple but attractive name should be follow to make it easy for people to look for. There are lots of tips on how to choose a domain name:

1. Your Domain Name Should Be Your Website NameNaming your site after your domain may seem obvious to some of you, but you'll be surprised to learn that not every website is named after the domain name even when the webmaster owns that domain name.

2. Generic Names Or Brand Name Domains?I know that a number of people seem to think that your domain name really must be some generic name like "cars.com" if you are selling cars. Witness, for example, how much money those generic names are being sold for. But seriously, if you were looking for a car, you'll probably already have some brands in mind, and you're more like to try out things like generalmotors.com or toyota.com rather than just cars.com.

3. Long or Short Domain Names?Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters. You don't have to settle for an obscure domain name like avab.com when what you mean is AcmeVideosAndBooks.com.

4. Plurals, "The", and "My" Forms of the Domain NameVery often, if you can't get the domain name you want, the domain name registrar will suggest alternate forms of the name you typed. For example, if you wanted website.com, and it was taken (of course it is), it might suggest forms like: thewebsite.commywebsite.comwebsites.com

5. COM, ORG, NET, etc?One common question I encounter is from people who can't get the ".com" domain of their choice, but find the ".net", ".org" or other country-specific top level domains (TLDs) available (like .de, .nu, .sg, etc).

Consider assignment 7 as your point of reference, choose at least one post/article of your classmates and make a review. (1000words)

I am going to review one of George’s entries entitled “Making Money with Article: Niche Websites” by Jo Han Mok. The study was all about making money out of making articles in the internet. According to Jo Han Mok (2009), we are never limited in what we can do with niche website marketing, unless we find out that we do not have the marketing skills or the needed funding to make it happen, otherwise, the sky is the limit.

According to Jo Han Mok (2009), choosing a good niche subject to base your website around is one of the most important aspects of making money off of your articles. This will give you a foundation to build from and you can target one general audience with a pack of keywords that they are most likely to be searching for. You should take each one of these keywords and use it for the basis of one article on each page. This way, even though you are targeting one specific subject, you will be sure to interest a wide variety of people in that one niche. They may also find other pages that interest them, which will keep them returning to your site to learn new information about the niche subject.

If there are a number of topics that you like, pick the one that you feel would be easiest to start with and then, once that site is built and generating some revenue, you can start another site. The most profitable website marketers, who use their talent of finding niches and combining that with good site content and a handful of affiliate links, have a good amount and variety of niche sites that they have started.

Although I still don’t have enough knowledge with niche website marketing but I know that other than this there are lots of ways to earn money especially in the internet. Most of us are not aware that submitting well written articles could generate income online. Writing articles online is one way to gain easy money. But also, if you have the skills to write quality informative articles, then money is not a problem. There are lots of site that allows this kind of jobs through the use of creative writing talents. It could either be based on the popularity of the article or if the article is interesting enough to attract the readers.Also, you can’t just easily earn lot of money by just simply posting one article but build an article collection. Make it a habit to always add new well-written articles and it would be better if it could be done everyday. This will make your article collection grow faster and your profit as well.

Blogging is also one good example. Although you may currently have a stable job that pays quite well and keeps a roof over your head and pays for all household expenses. However, times are different and you can never tell when crisis would hit and it is always prudent to have a nest egg that you can count on when it happens. If you have writing skills and internet savvy, you can earn money through blog, an online tool that is used for personal as well as business purposes.

There are several ways to earn money through blog and one of the most popular is being a professional blogger for online businesses in need of advertising tools to help in selling their wares to potential buyers. It will give you a great edge if you are an expert in SEO and keywords since most paid blogging sites are looking for those who are proficient in these two things.

Another way to earn money through blog is to make your page available for online businesses to advertise their products in. You will have to keep your blog site as visible as possible so it can attract more businesses to advertise for a fee. The relevance of the information in your blog is very important because people are always looking for useful information that they can use in their daily lives you will have to come up with topics that will catch the attention of as many people as possible. However, there should be a focus in your blogs, that is, a specific purpose for the information that you impart.

For many, they thought that blogging is a thing for kids. Well, I think that was not true since I also have blog. They just don’t realize that we can earn money by making blogs. I find it a habit to search for updates of my favorite Korean star in blogs. For me, new updates are really a good point in order for me to continually browse it. Thus, uploading fresh articles everyday is really a need to ensure that readers' expectations are fulfilled. If the blog site does not get a daily update of what is going on, they might start looking for other blog sites that can provide them more information.

Before, people did not use to earn money making blogs. These web sites were just pure personal spaces or pages where one can share a story or vent out about anything under the sun without having to get his work edited. Now, blogs are categorized in niches and a lot of individuals use blog pages to attract visitors and the more visitors they get, the more potential for earning. One may ask, though, how a person can make serious cash through blogging.

The only answer on how to earn money making blogs is through advertisements. There are hundreds of companies out there who need visibility and presence. If a blog site is specializing in a particular niche, say, dogs, this blog site will have so many patrons who look forward to reading fresh articles about dogs. And since the blog site is about canines, the blog owner can contact companies willing to advertise dog food and dog grooming products and other dog accessories.

Since this topic is to comment from the answer of my classmates in Assignment Number 7, I will now dominate the chance to answer them in a manner of something. Just kidding. Since our theme for this year’s research proposal is about green campus computing, I will now have to comment about what George Dan Gil Duran’s answer. The article he has mentioned is about Green computing: IBM introduces new energy management software By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff –Manufacturing Business Technology. “No matter where discovery takes place, IBM Researchers push the boundaries of science, technology and business to make the world work better. Our global network of scientists work on a range of applied and exploratory research projects to help clients, governments and universities apply scientific breakthroughs to solve real-world business and societal challenges.”

In this article he mentioned that as part of IBM’s Project Big Green, they have announced new software developed in order to help costumers in maximizing the energy efficiency and reduced cost associated with power and cooling. This latest version of IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) software combines views of energy management information that enable optimization across data centers and facilities infrastructures. Monitoring capabilities offer customers the ability to understand energy usage and alert data center managers to potential energy-related problems and take preventive action. Historical trending and forecasting capabilities enable greater precision in existing environments and energy planning. Autonomic capabilities allow customers to set power and utilization thresholds to help control energy usage. The new software can also help customers handle physical constraints in the data center relating tospace, power, andcooling. This new software of IBM provide not just in data centers but also in non-IT assets such as air conditioning equipment, power distribution units, lighting, and security systems. IBM will join forces with nine partners to offer IBM's IT management expertise with solutions that will allow customers to monitor and control energy consumption across their enterprise to help reduce power consumption and energy costs and better maintain service levels. The partners include:APC and TAC by Schneider Electric: Eaton Corporation: Emerson Network Power JohnsonControls,Inc.Matrikon: OSIsoft: Siemens Building Technologies: SynapSenseCorporation: VMware:

This article simply defines about a technical research about green campus computing. On which is really a great help to us. One example on which what we should do and to create about our research this trend today. Since green campus computing is really about how to make ways on which the user in technology helps save the environment, the idea of IBM is a great help. Not only to satisfy what has the user wanted but also to satisfy the need of the ecosystem. And since that, they have included partners to this project, this maybe is no questionable of this thing would really happen. Green campus computing is now on the trend today, specifically it is being used or common to everyone, especially to those who interacts with technology.

Consider assignment 7 as your point of reference, choose at least one post/article of your classmates and make a review. (1000words)

I’m going to review Cherry Ann Montejo’s entry about The Promise of Information Technology in the Travel Industry. It’s pretty familiar to us what technology provides us.Technology is present in every area of our lives. The reason for integrating technology into small and large business should not be because they feel it must, but rather that it meets the needs of the business and gives an advantage as well. Competitive advantage is gained from getting products to market, offer desirable services, investigating marketing campaigns and responding to customers quicker than competitors; well it is a race where the hare finishes ahead of the tortoise. Even if that advantage is minute, it still spells profit.

Likewise, technology nowadays is fast moving and thus provides some benefits to some organizations and business level as well. The use of such technologies will surely brings life to what the organization is all about. Advances in Information Technology provide opportunities for the development of certain company in terms of their product and services offered to customers.

Taking a review about Cherry’s entry on the Promise of Information Technology in Travel Agency, it’s really centered on the communication and processing of information. Many travel agencies now make use of the online services to obtain travel information and make some reservations. The travel industry is being fundamentally altered by IT. The future of the traveling agencies somewhat depends on the evolution of Information Technology. Without the technology, their business operation affected. They may have some information systems which is valuable since it really helps the company do their tasks effective and efficiently thus providing good information or output to customers as well as the company itself. Nowadays, some business operations are done online. Customers just make use of the internet to have some information needed. Paying bills, hotel reservations and transport services are some of those rendered services. The company itself becomes more competitive enough when they make use of the said technology. Though the competition is there, still if they know how to work with the technology, then its progress on their part. Business and technology are partners. Business alone cannot achieve their goals if technology is missing on the overall operation. There are some disadvantages but minimal I guess. Travel agencies need to use IT to their advantage by exploiting their core competencies. Being only slightly ahead of the competitor may be better than light years ahead. The fifteen-minute competitive advantage, means staying a little ahead of the competition, but close enough that customers can still understand and patronize the services offered.

I am going to evaluate the paper entitled “Usability and Open Source Software” reviewed by Ate Chen-Chen. This is already a familiar topic to me because of our Elective 1 subject, which is about Free and Open Source Software. We have also touched the issue of usability of Open source software so I think this paper will be able to give us more information about that topic.

The paper studies the usability of open source software and suggests possible improvements for in usability. The paper first reviewed the existing evidence of usability of open source software. Then, it outlined how the characteristics of open source development influence the software itself.

It started with actually asking if there IS an open source usability problem – which, I think, is just appropriate because the study would be insignificant if there never was a problem with open source usability in the first place. With the help of the Internet, open source development was facilitated easily among developers and open source software is quickly gaining popularity. However, most of the users of open source applications are relatively more technically sophisticated that the average desktop user that uses standard proprietary software. According to them, there are many factors that may have contributed to this scenario, but the focus is on usability.

Usability is typically described in terms of five characteristics:1. Ease of learning2. Efficiency of use3. Memorability4. Error frequency and severity5. Subjective satisfaction

It was stated in the paper that all software has usability problems, but the issue is: how does software produced by an open source development process compare with other approaches? The study was unable to arrange a controlled experiment to compare the alternative engineering approaches but it was able to compare similar tasks on existing software programs produced in different development environments.

Comparing open source and proprietary, since open source is public, the past versions are visible and you can see the progress but in proprietary, these are restricted and when they come out, they are already complete.

The study cited the development process of open source software that may have some influence on the poor usability of open source software. They used two main sources for this. The first is that the developers are not users. This problem in the development process refers to open source software being made by experts for experts. But then, they are also now being used by non-experts who could not see the usability of the software because it may be too technical already for the majority of them to comprehend. This flaw in open source development has been mitigated in commercial software where it recognized the non-technical user’s point of view and employed methods to balance their software in favor of users. The next problem the paper cited is that usability experts do not get involved in open source development. Another is that open source development tends to aim more at functionality than usability. This is only good if all users are technical experts. The next is that usability problems are harder to specify and distribute than functionality problems. I think this is the same as the saying “What is moral to me might not be moral to you”. In other words, it is difficult to define the exact standard of usability because of the varying technical capabilities of users. Another factor is the lack of budget for open source development. Since it is open source, it is mostly voluntary work and so open source developers work on small budgets. The prominence of commercial software also contributes to the poor usability of open source.

There are more issues in the open source development that were cited in the paper, however, I will skip those parts and focus now on what the study suggested as potential approaches to improving open source usability. From all the approaches the paper cited, I think that involving the end users is the best idea. After all, they are the ones who are going to use the software so they should be involved in some way in the development process.

That ends the summary of the paper – at least, if I were to summarize it. Now for the evaluation, the first thing I noticed is the title. It is very short – only four words, excluding “end” – but it clearly suggests what the paper is all about.

In terms of content, the paper is very informative. It provided the readers with the existing usability issues and suggested possible improvements. In terms of format, I do not think it followed the APA format but it is still acceptable because the flow of the paper is good and understandable. The abstract is also very short – only one paragraph – and I think, based on what I learned, is somewhat lacking. The abstract should give the readers an idea of what problem the study is trying to solve, what methodology it is going to use, and a summary of the findings. The paper stopped in defining the problem.

I also noticed that there is no formal methodology section in the paper and I honestly was confused what kind of methods they used. They did not clearly state how they were able to get the existing usability issues – did they conduct a survey, an experiment, or something? There were also no methods describing how they came up with the possible approaches. From what was given in the paper alone, I guess they just conducted an exhaustive literature review and did not actually do any technical experiment or something along that line. However, I would also like to commend them for the many sources they had for the entire study. I was only disappointed in the “usability and open source development” section because they heavily relied on only TWO references, which I think is not enough, considering that open source is very diverse and there may be a LOT of factors influencing the open source development process. Even in the possible approaches, they also only did something like a literature review. In fact, the whole paper felt to me like a long literature review because there were no formal methods described.

However, it was good that they discussed future works and I was glad to read that they suggested some deeper study about the usability of open source software. The study is only like an introduction to a series of more studies, hopefully more technical ones. They also presented some issues that also need further research.

Overall, I think the paper is average and this decision may have been influenced by the fact that I was expecting something technical from it and it failed to meet that expectation.

Before you call a web developer, Ask yourself one questionBySusan Daffron

I would like to make a review of one of the posted articles by my classmates and what I have chosen is the article that was posted by George Duran on “before you call a web developer, ask yourself one question”. As what I have read in his posted article, it would suggest one thing and that is “is there a reason for existence of things around us?”

Anyway, let’s go back to the entry of George Duran. One thing that one should ask first before doing an action is “why do you need to do this?”. This would suggest that one should establish goals first before doing anything. Just like in putting up a website. One should know what the main purpose of having a site is.

In particular, our System in our Systems Analysis and Design 2 is the online version of the University Publication. The main purpose of having the site is to become the voice of the students and to let every student in the university express their thoughts and talents in writing through our site. One of the goals of our site is to help every student in EVERY COLLEGE be heard and not just focusing on to the people who are in frontline. Specifically, our site would also help contribute to a greener environment since it would reduce the usage of papers where in fact, papers came from trees right? So less paper means less trees that needs to be cut just to produce a piece of paper. The said goals were established since our group have noticed some existing problems, for example, a student would want to submit his /her article at the office but then whenever the office is closed then there would be no choice for this student but to come back to the office some other time. And this would result to waste of the energy and effort of the student to go to that office. In addition, whenever a student would want to comment on a particular article, with the old system, the student would have no choice but to keep the comment to himself since the article has been published in a paper. Furthermore, every semester, a student would pay Php 55.00 to the University Publication, but then there are tendencies that the newspaper / magazine are lacking that not every student can get his own magazine.

But with the help of our system, this could minimize and even lessen the said problems. The students do not need to go to the office just to submit an article since our system does have a feature on that, similar to an email. They just have to log on our site and register themselves in the convenience of their own homes. Then, after doing so, they can submit now their article and can even comment to other published articles.

To go back to George’s post, he quoted that “when setting Web site goals, it makes sense to think about the visitors you are hoping to attract to the site. Who will be reading it? What do they need to know? Why would they visit your site in the first place? What terms would they type into a search engine to find your site? If you do not have good answers for these questions, you should reconsider the question I asked at the beginning of this article: why do you need a website?”

After establishing goals, one should gather the necessary data to come up with the website. Most probably, the owner should now visualize and conceptualize on to what are the contents of his/her site so that the visitors would be attracted to always browse your site. The article is very interesting in a sense that it would teach us something with regards to technology and also in real life situations. That as to everything we do we should think of it a couple and even a hundred times so that we won’t waste our time, money perhaps and effort in putting into action on what we really want to do. And so that we would not want to regret the things we’ve done and to be prepared for the possible consequences that one may face.

One article that also caught my attention is the article that was posted by Cherry Ann Montejo that has a title of “The Promise of Information Technology in the Travel Industry”. As I go through the article, I do agree with what Cherry has said, time would come that information technology would take place in the travel industry, the IT Professionals would be developing enhancements on online ticketing etc. that would help the tourist be more comfortable and convenient on their part to travel around the world.

I may somehow relate this one to the one of the so called feature of St. Peter Life Plans. One would not need to go home just to be there in the wake of their loved ones who passed away, through their (referring to the St. Peter Life Plans) cctv or built in camera in their chapels, it would seem like you are on the actual wake. But for me, it would still be better to be there with your loved ones (hehehe).

Also, I would relate it with the reality show “Amazing Race” that there are chosen people that would race around the world. The online ticketing system would be a good strategy in booking up early flights to their respective destination. All they have to do is just login to the website and do the transactions there! It would truly help them in winning 1 million US Dollars (that’s’ a lot of money there)

Anyway, the title is very catchy, that as you read the title, you would have a glimpse and you would understand already what the article is all about. It would be very nice if I and my group mates would come up with a good research title that one would understand what our topic is all about by just reading its title.

First of all, the research paper composed only 9 pages. It is about Information Technology and the innovations that it can do to travel industry. I chose to review this research not only because it is related to my course, but since it talks about traveling; traveling because one of my ultimate dreams in life is to travel around the world, to experience the leisure of traveling and to experience riding on an airplane, ship, train and not just on a bus.

As stated in the paper, it is true that Information Technology plays a vital role in the way the travel industry responds as the world is getting connected at almost every level. Because of Information Technology, it is now easy for us to communicate through the use of mobile phones and anything that is used as a means of communication. It is also easy for us to travel even if it is outside the country because transportation technologies do exist. In addition, these tools for communication and transportation are getting better to satisfy end-users and make them feel at ease and special.

Numbers of different gadgets are made to make users not to feel the boredom while traveling or not. One may have an mp3, mp4, or even mp5 player that can store and play music, video and images for the memories to keep. Gadgets like PSP for playing games and others.

As stated in the paper, its purpose is three-fold. The first one is to examine the effect of network computing, the combination of electric ticketing and smart cards, corporate travel management systems, and other trends that are transforming the travel industry. Second is to examine the publicly issues involved such as the liberalization of government regulations, affordability and ease of use, and data security and privacy. Lastly, is to present the future direction of underlying technologies such as displays, storage, and microprocessors and advancements in the global networking infrastructure, mobility, and speech recognition.

It had been estimated by the World Travel and Tourism Council that in the last year (2005), the gross output of travel and tourism at $3.4 trillion that was estimated in the year 1995, the figure had been expected to more than double to $7.2 trillion. The paper presented also that the customer expenditures, which is the largest piece of the industry, were $1.9 trillion in 1995 was growing to $3.9 trillion in the last year 2005. In addition, in the same period, the capital investment had been expected to grow by nearly 70% and 54% for the business travel.

Because of the massive changes in the travel industry caused by Information Technology, numerous questions for both the customer and the industry had been raised. One of the examples that was stated in the paper is that, if the customers can make and pay for reservations directly through the use of Internet, what happens to the traditional role of the travel agent as the intermediary? Another one is that, how do service providers quantify and plan for proposed changes to achieve lower costs, better utilization and gains in customer loyalty if kiosks, voice recognition units and smarty cards become the norm for airport, rental car, and hotel check-in processes? This is true. However, Information Technology exists and technology tools are created not to disrupt humans but to make their lives even better and make things easier. Again, there are people who chose to work on things without the aid of information and computing technologies, those people that are already used to the traditional methods.

Information Technology transforms travel industry. The researchers stated in the paper that for more than 30 years, Information Technology has been exploited by the travel industry, and that Information Technology is becoming even more important in helping the companies survive and grow as costs and service expectations rise, cycle times compress, and given that market share is becoming harder to maintain.

It has been stated also in the paper that Information Technology plays an essential role in lowering the cost of business processes, such as inventory management, scheduling, pricing, and customer service, which is true, and that the global scale and scope can only be managed with real-time information and constant communications.

The paper also describes the three applications that will revolutionize the travel industry, such as network computing, the combination of electricity ticketing and smart cards, and corporate travel management systems.

For the first application, network computing represents a powerful computing evolution where the applications and data reside in the network. Network computing allows companies to connect to their customers, suppliers, and business partners, when an individual is at work, home or school can still be able to share information over interconnected networks, businesses, governments, and educational institutions can also reach new markets, offer new services, and lower costs.

The second application is the combination of electric ticketing and smart cards in which it eliminates a large percentage of the cost from travel distribution by way of on-line settlement, revenue accounting, and elimination of physical ticket handling and ticket delivery.

The third and the last application is the corporate travel management. As stated in the paper, the total corporate travel management expands from booking reservations to expense reporting and disbursement. Corporations will look to travel managers for ways to control escalating costs and expenses. By this, travel agents will become more differentiated, specializing in specific travel offerings and will extend their capabilities to other value-added services.

The researchers of the study made implications of future technology on travel and these are the following: enhancement of voice recognition to further simplify the reservation process, Internet search engines that are more powerful and easier to use, Internet tools that mine the customer data to reverse the equation around, videoconferencing at the individual work station which is of high quality, and WebTV and network programming tools like Java so as to expand the Internet customer base.

Overall, the research views the future of travel as enabled by Information Technology.

I would like to review one of miss cherry ann’s work. It was all about usability and open source software. It was still fresh in my mind because we have discussed this in one of our subjects and it will be easy for me to make a review on it.

According to miss cherry, the study reviews the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discusses how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. It describes how existing human computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities of developers and users to address issues of usability.

These days, there are already lots of open source institutions including small ones who have successfully developed pieces of software and most of it was used by technically sophisticated users in software development or as part of the larger computing infrastructure.

In the paper, it describes two different paradigms to interpret the topic. First is the open source developer-user who both uses the software and contributes to its development and second is the user-centered design movement that attempts to bridge the gap between programmers and users through specific techniques like usability engineering or participatory design.

It also asks a question if there is an open source usability problem. Based on my learning in our elective subject, open source software is known for reliability, functionality that really surprised many people including business institutions. Even today, internet was also involved in producing open source solutions.

There are usability problems with open source software are not significant by itself; all interactive software has problems. The issue is: how does software produced by an open source development process compare with other approaches? Unfortunately it is not easy to arrange a controlled experiment to compare the alternative engineering approaches; however it is possible to compare similar tasks on existing software programs produced in different development environments (Nichols, 2002).

There is a scarcity of published usability studies of open source software. The characteristics of open source projects emphasize continual incremental development that does not lend itself to formal studies. Although there are few formal studies of open source usability there are several suggestions that open source software usability is a significant issue

To understand the usability of current OSS there is a need to examine the current software development process. It is a truism of user-centered design that the development activities are reflected in the developed system. In addition there are some features that are shared with the commercial sector that help to explain why if OSS usability is no worse than proprietary systems, nor is it any better. This list of features is not intended to be complete but to serves as a starting point in addressing these issues. It was noted in the paper that there would seem to be significant difficulties in ‘proving’ whether several of these hypotheses are correct.

It was also stated in the paper that usability problems are harder to specify and distribute than functionality problems. Functionality problems are easier to specify, evaluate and modularize than usability problems. These are all attributes which simplify decentralized problem solving. Some (but not all) usability problems are much harder to describe and may pervade an entire screen, interaction or user experience. Incremental patches to interface bugs may be far less effective than incremental patches to functionality bugs. Fixing the problem may require a major overhaul of the entire interface – clearly not a small contribution to the ongoing design work. Involving more than one designer in interface design, particularly if they work autonomously, will lead to design inconsistency and hence lower the overall usability.

There are also potential approaches that to improve Open source software usability. It aims to account for the current relatively poor state of the usability of many open source product. Commercial Approaches, technology approaches, academic involvement, involving the end users, creating a usability discussion infrastructure, fragmenting usability and design, involving the experts, education and evangelism are areas where there can be seen a potential in improving usability process in the development of OSS.

To summarize it all, I think the paper was not totally implying that the usability of OSS development has completely ignored the importance of good usability. I agree with miss cherry that they are just suggesting that open source community was increasing its awareness of usability issues and it was good to know that because of this paper we are also aware that this kind of things happens.

I would like to make a review on the research paper found by Ms. Mariechelle Alcoriza, entitled Computers May Slowly Be Turning Green by Jon Norwood.

People tend to discover and create something to improve the quality of life of every individual. Technology is one of the fruit of this discovery and creation. In today’s world, people live dependently on the things that make our life more convenient and easier. Say for example, we use remote controls in changing channels in our television rather than manually pressing its buttons. Through technology, simple problems we find solutions. Yes, it greatly affects us positively but there will always be a negative side of that. Abusive use of technology results to off-putting side effects.

One great effects of abusive use of technology is global warming. Global warming as most know is a phenomenon that is changing the climate of the Earth slowly and dramatically. One of the primary causes is carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere which helps trap heat that the earth would normally release. The trapped heat builds up over time and causes climate shifts across the globe. These shifts in general mean that warmer climates can cool down, and cooler climates may warm up. When the coldest areas on earth such as the North and South Poles warm up, the ice in these areas begins to melt. The result is an enormous amount of new water in the Earth’s oceans, and the coastal regions will end up submerged. Computers have been a growing part in the global warming problem.

In the paper of Jon Norwood which Mariechelle presented, it clearly discusses how computer manufacturers find new ways how to lessen the negative impact of computers and technology to the environment.

According to the research, Coal pits, air conditioners, cars and factories are all obvious culprits in the Global Warming issue. Computers however have gone for the most partum noticed by many who are concerned by the environment. A PC draws between 200 and 700 watts when left on. Compared to an automobile commuting 2 hours a day this isn’t much, but it is much more than a DVD player or a TV. 600 watts over time will add considerably to an electric bill, and it will send a great deal of CO2 into the atmosphere over the course of a year. Computer components contain a considerable amount of lead. In a single PC this is no issue at all, but when looking at computers globally it becomes a huge problem. The computers must be disposed of somehow, which means all that lead ends up somewhere. Even if many parts find there way into reused PCs and Refurbished Laptops, landfills still have an enormous amount o lead to deal with.Europe has begun to take the computer disposal problem seriously. With lead-free computing the goal, several regulations are currently being established to help promote the concept of a “Green PC". In America, Dell Inc pledged to plant a tree for every PC they sell beginning in early2008. This type of environmental concern is not new to Dell. In 2004 they started a program where they would recycle anyone’s old PC if they upgraded to Dell hardware.PC World is currently working on a carbon neutral PC that focuses primarily on decreasing the power requirements of the computer meaning less carbon in the atmosphere over time. While this is a strong step in the right direction, it is only a start. Almost75% of all the environmental damage a computer will do over its lifetime is done before the consumer turns it on according to a 2004 UN University report. The manufacturing process PCs go through is the real environmental concern as on average 10 times the weight of the PC in raw materials will be burned through during its creation. This is a problem bigger than the US as a great deal of hardware used in American computers is imported. Companies such as Dell and Gateway will have to become more mindful of where the parts they are using come from, and perhaps refuse to purchase from firms that are not environmentally friendly. This would more than likely increase the cost of computers immediately , but that may be a necessary change.

We usually experience the result or effects of the climate change, hot weather on the days and cold rainy nights that we merely experience few years ago. As what Mariechelle said, writing this paper would really help in promoting awareness to those people who are not aware of what is happening right now. And it would encourage some researchers to be more focus on researching or finding ways how to lessen the effects of abusive use of technology through Green Computing. And it will also encourage even every individual to take part of it by buying eco-friendly electronic units or trying to spread or promote awareness in this matter. We live in this world so we should take good care of it.

SummaryThe research paper discusses the primary role of the Internet on different kinds of business practices. It tells that internet is a significant factor in the price competition in the global market. It cited two important attributes that must be recognized in order to distinguish the difference in buying in the store from buying in the internet, namely digital and non-digital attributes of the products or the services. It also provides formulas which are used in presenting the probability of the effects of the internet in various aspects of business practices. It uses direct observations and statistics in derivation of the conclusion.

EvaluationUpon reading, I realized that internet doesn’t always intensify price competition. Yes, it plays an important role in business market but it does not necessarily mean that there is an assurance that there are lots of people shopping in the internet. Even though there are lots of advantages given by the internet, evaluating the product’s quality cannot be made in the internet since it just provides description of the product which affects the evaluation of fair pricing.

the article above is the one that get my attention most. Though maybe as for now I am not yet a businesswoman but someday maybe I will be one and also the reason why I'm interested to give my eview on it because it contradicts what I used to believe in, that is, "MARAMING PERA SA INTERNET", I guess I am not the only person who luckily hear it and often people who said this ae not far from my age. That is why I keep on thinking that yes, there's a lot of money on the internet but the question is where and how.

According to Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo's evaluation is that "INTERNET DOESN'T INTENSIFY PRICE", but I guess rather Internet gives those business or businessman to go to a more bigger market. It will be the one to put a bidge between offshore clients and etc. But this doesn't garranty you a hundred pecent of money. Because consumers are more wise now, since immitations are eveywhere now and this reason alone, internet can't give any assurance to consumers that their are not a scam or so.

So, its better to have first a small business, step-by-step procedure will do. Create first a name below before going up, this will serve as your back-up or authentication that you are a good businessman/woman.

and also, I guess with this topic INTERNET DEPENDENCY becomes an issue. right? because, most people of y2k or X generation are vey dependent on what they can possibly gain from internet.But its up to the person if he/she will satisfy herself.

As what I have read, "internet Adoption slowing- but dependendy for it continues to grow", with this article alone it shows that all people are now very dependent. I guess,time will come that BOOKS will become useless because of this fast evolving technology and if time will come that al business transactions are to be made Online, people would become poor in identfyinggood quality or not because everything you want to know about it will be base through internet.

Its so cruel to think that students may not want to go to school because they've become addict to internet or give their parents a reason that he/she don't need to go to school because for him/her is, everything is under the internet without getting into the other side.How about if people using this wil easily belive in it, its so sad to think thay people really ely evrything on the net.

This review is after Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo’s scientific research no. 3.

Usability and Open Source SoftwareDavid M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale*Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand

Before anything else, what is an Open Source Software?

Open Source Software is a form of software in which users are given or can obtain the original source code from which a program is compiled, and which also includes a license allowing users to use, modify, and redistribute the code. Users can then review the software, add features to it or hire programmers to add features, or fix errors known as bugs rather than wait for the original software publisher or creator to release a patch or bring out a new version. With open source software, programmers – many of them nonprofessionals – contribute to the computing community by making their improvements and bug fixes available to other users.

Although using open source software by sophisticated users is at large, an average computer user directly interacts with proprietary software. The paper gives reasons for this situation; one of which is the perception that open source software has less usability. The paper examined how the open source development process influences usability and suggests usability improvement methods that are appropriate for community-based software development on the Internet.

One interpretation of this topic can be presented as the meeting of two different paradigms:• the open source developer-user who both uses the software and contributes to its development• the user-centered design movement that attempts to bridge the gap between programmers and users through specific techniques (usability engineering, participatory design, ethnography etc.)The user-centered design approach emphasizes the software developers cannot easily design for typical users. This suggests that open source developer communities will not easily replace their proprietary software.

The paper has reviewed the existing evidence of the usability of open source software, outlined the ways in which the characteristics of open source development influence the software and described how existing human – computer interaction (HCI) techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities to address issues of usability.

The question is:

Is there an open source usability problem?

The paper has described ‘usability’ in terms of five characteristic: ease of learning, efficiency of use, memorability, error frequency and severity, and subjective satisfaction. Though open source software has gained reputation for reliability, efficiency, functionality; it has poorer usability. All interactive software has problems. The issue is, how does software produced by an open source development process compare with other approaches?

As the users of software became more heterogeneous, and less technically experienced, software producers started to adopt user-centered methods to ensure that their products were successfully adopted by their new users. Whilst many users continue to have problems with software applications, the HCI specialists employed by companies have greatly improved users' experiences.

According to this research, it is difficult to give a definitive answer to the question: is there an open source usability problem? However, in order to suggest HCI approaches that mesh with the practical and social characteristics of open source developers (and users) it is necessary to examine the aspects of the development process that may have a negative impact on usability.

The key point is ‘developers are not users’. For many more advanced OSS products, developers are indeed users, and these products which are difficult to understand with interfaces that would be unusable by a less technically skilled group of users are perfectly adequate for their intended elite audience. Indeed there may be a certain pride in the creation of a sophisticated product with a powerful, but challenging to learn interface. Learning and mastering how to use product is difficult and so legitimates membership of an elite who can then distinguish itself from so-called 'users'.

At this point, I would like to conclude that open source software developers could not target the ‘users’ needs and that’s why these ‘users’ could not appreciate OSS’s usability and would prefer to use proprietary software on their desktop.

Considering the assignment seven as my point of reference I will choose the post of Miss Cherry Montejo, entitled Usability and Open Source Software by David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale. I choose this topic or article because I am familiar with the topic and I need to know more about the topic especially that we are discussing in our elective one about the open source software. Not really about the open source software but about the free open source but they are related. And understanding the topic will also help me in my other project.

First the study presented the problem. It was asking if there is a problem in open source usability. This part of the paper is the part where in you will be able to know the objective of the study and how they arrived to the idea of open source usability. For this you will be able to determine the problems and the resolutions for the said problems.

In the study two different paradigms were presented these are:the open source developer-user who both uses the software and contributes to its developmentthe user-centred design movement that attempts to bridge the gap between programmers and users through specific techniques (usability engineering, participatory design, ethnography etc.)The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper, review of the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We are all familiar with the open source; its definition and its importance. The study is all about the Improvements in the usability of open source software. The use of open source software today is growing but still there are developers who will stick to the proprietary because as what they have know open source have less usability. This paper examines how the open source development process influences usability and suggests usability improvement methods that are appropriate for community-based software development on the Internet. Open source software has gained a reputation for reliability, efficiency, functionality that has surprised many people in the software engineering world. But still others are using the proprietary because of some important reasons. In this paper we are concerned with one possible explanation: that (for most potential users) open source software has poorer usability. Usability is typically described in terms of five characteristics: ease of learning, efficiency of use, memorability, error frequency and severity, and subjective satisfaction (Nielsen, 1993). Usability is separate from the utility of software (whether it can perform some function) and from other characteristics such as reliability and cost.

To understand the usability of current OSS it need to examine the current software development process.It is a truism of user-centred design that the development activities are reflected in the developed system.Drawing extensively from two main sources (Nichols et al., 2001; Thomas, 2002) it was presented a set of features of the OSS development process that appear to contribute to the problem of poor usability. In addition there are some features that are shared with the commercial sector that help to explain why if OSS usability is no worse than proprietary systems, nor is it any better.

In the study they make hypotheses and investigate about it whether their hypothesis are correct. They describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability. They also sited some factors that affect the usability of open source. It does not focuses to one thing but all the factors that is involved in the opens source software usability. It was also presented the Potential approaches to improving OSS usability; such as Commercial approaches, Technological approaches. The approaches outlined need further investigation and indeed experimentation to see if they can be feasibly used in OSS projects, without disrupting the factors that make traditional functionality-centric open source software development so effective. These approaches are not necessarily restricted to open source software several can be applied to proprietary software.

This paper is the first detailed discussion of these issues in the literature. Lieberman and Fry (2001) foresee that ‘interacting with buggy software will be a cooperative problem solving activity of the end user, the system, and the developer.’ For some open source developers this is already true, expanding this situation to (potentially) include all of the end-users of the system would mark a significant change in software development practices.There are many techniques from HCI that can be easily and cheaply adopted by open source developers.Additionally there are several approaches that seem to provide a particularly good fit with a distributed networked community of users and developers. If open source projects can provide a simple framework for users to contribute non-technical information about software to the developers then they can leverage and promote the participatory ethos amongst their users. Raymond (1998) proposed that ‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’ For seeing usability bugs, the traditional open source community may comprise the wrong kind of eyeballs. However it may be that by encouraging greater involvement of usability experts and end users it is the case that: given enough user experience reports all usability issues are shallow. By further engaging typical users into the development process OSS projects can create a networked development community that can do for usability what it has already done for functionality and reliability.

After I read the study, I have read from an article that people are promoting about the open source but it will not be convincing if what they know about the open source software had poor usability. That is why they conducted a study to be able to know the usability of open source software. Once a reservoir of open source usability knowledge that rivals our pool of programming knowledge, open source development will not only be the best way to achieve technically excellent software, but will also become the best way to produce usable software.

Ms. Sheryl Caguimbaga posted on Service Quality Evaluation Method for Community-based Software Outsourcing Process by Huimin Jiang, Alice Liu, Zhongjie Wang and Shu Liu from the School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology.

With the rapid socio-economic development, service becomes more and more popular. At the same time, service quality is increasingly attracting wide attentions. The reason why service quality becomes so important is that the higher value of service quality can lead to higher customer satisfaction, and ultimately result in higher revenue growth and profitability. More and more enterprises are looking to outsource their software development to other companies, respond to the pressures such as development costs, human resources access, new market development, or building business competencies. Recently, to outsource software development to the community developers through web has been recognized by more and more people. This outsourcing approach is termed as community-based software model in this paper. According to the paper, outsourcing software development to the community developers is a promising model to help reduce software development cost and improve software quality. The paper presented a method to evaluate the quality of service in the managing community-based software outsourcing process. There are three types of objects whose service quality need to be evaluated, i.e. service behaviors, service products, and service providers. For each type of object, there are five dimensions of quality indicators, i.e. time and efficiency, price and cost, quality of service content, resources and conditions, reputation and risk. Based on these dimensions, the researchers built a set of quality indicators and the corresponding measurement methods. The researchers adopted the traditional AHP method to calculate the total quality of each type of object. Call-For-Implementation is community-based software development method put forward by IBM china research lab. In the paper, Call-For-Implementation was taken as an example to introduce how to apply the proposed service evaluation method. A prototype is developed to support the evaluation process and exhibit results of quality evaluation. The main contribution of this paper is that an objective and dynamic service quality computation method is proposed to help evaluate the quality of outsourcing software management service.

Back to the paper posted by Ms. Sheryl, the content is informative although there were some abbreviations that were not explained well. Although the papers topic is about outsourcing, the term itself was also not properly emphasized same as what Ms. Sheryl noticed. As I read through the paper, I think the paper was more concerned on the Service Quality Evaluation Method. The researchers presented the findings in an orderly manner making the paper interesting to read. Since the term outsourcing was not emphasized in the paper, I made some readings about it.

According to wiseGEEK.com, Outsourcing refers to a company that contracts with another company to provide services that might otherwise be performed by in-house employees. There are many reasons that companies outsource various jobs, but the most prominent advantage seems to be the fact that it often saves money. Many of the companies that provide outsourcing services are able to do the work for considerably less money, as they don't have to provide benefits to their workers and have fewer overhead expenses to worry about.

Outsourcing also allows companies to focus on other business issues while having the details taken care of by outside experts. This means that a large amount of resources and attention, which might fall on the shoulders of management professionals, can be used for more important, broader issues within the company. The specialized company that handles the outsourced work is often streamlined, and often has world-class capabilities and access to new technology that a company couldn't afford to buy on their own. Plus, if a company is looking to expand, outsourcing is a cost-effective way to start building foundations in other countries.

There are some disadvantages to outsourcing as well. One of these is that outsourcing often eliminates direct communication between a company and its clients. This prevents a company from building solid relationships with their customers, and often leads to dissatisfaction on one or both sides. There is also the danger of not being able to control some aspects of the company, as outsourcing may lead to delayed communications and project implementation. Any sensitive information is more vulnerable, and a company may become very dependent upon its outsource providers, which could lead to problems should the outsource provider back out on their contract suddenly.

Lever (1997) described four phases of outsourcing: discovery; negotiation; transition; and assessment. Zhu et al. (2001) also described four stages within the outsourcing process: planning; developing; implementing; and surviving. These process models are useful as a basis for understanding the steps involved in outsourcing. Discovery consists of benchmarking internal service levels, identifying future requirements, issuing requests for proposals and identifying a shortlist of suppliers. Planning is creating a sound business plan that includes all the present and future costs of outsourcing the activity as well as identifying hidden costs, such as impact on the community, customer services and employees. Negotiation entails selecting the supplier based on the compatibility of the supplier’s operating philosophy, approach to service and approach to joint planning. Development has a different focus. Negotiation is focused on creating a partnership; development, however, involves determining the appropriate vendor agreement with the appropriate level of detail, establishing the appropriate business relationship to be entered into by the buying and supplying companies, an assessment of the impact on and management of employee benefits, developing a timeline for outsourcing to happen and preparing a communications plan. This involves focusing not only on the relationship, but also on the internal issues that have to be addressed. In the transition stage, the company is planning and preparing staff and computer systems for transferral to the supplier. Similarly, implementation involves creating a transition plan and checklist. At the assessment stage, the supplier is providing the activity and the performance is monitored using service levels and benchmarks. At the end of this phase, the contract is either terminated or renegotiated. The survival stage involves a post-outsourcing review to determine if the objectives before the outsourcing were met by the outsourcing.

Distinct forces shaped each of the outsourcing processes: environmental forces, organizational forces, as well as individual and group forces. These forces influenced the activities to be outsourced and the motivations to outsource.

Within each of the cases environmental factors, factors external to the organization, were regarded as an influence on the outsourcing process, especially on the decision to outsource. These were the intensity of the competitive environment, the political and regulatory environment, changes or issues surrounding technology, and influences from the social environment. From an organizational perspective, history, strategy, cost, resources, critical incidents and competitive positioning all appeared to shape the outsourcing process. At an individual and group level, several factors appeared to influence the outsourcing processes: political behavior; altruism; power; and incomplete information.

Choose at least one post/article of your classmates and make a review.

From the assignment 7, I choose one article that was posted by Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo, the article was "Usability and Open Source Software"

Usability and Open Source SoftwareDavid M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale*Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand

SummaryThe study reviews the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discusses how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. It describes how existing human computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities of developers and users to address issues of usability.

EvaluationWhen I was half way reading this paper, I was thinking that the development of open-source software overlooked the importance of good usability. But when I was done reading, it made me conclude that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop. Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved.

Summary:The open source community is increasing its awareness of usability issues. This paper has identified certain barriers to usability and explored how these are being and can be addressed. Several of the approaches directly mirror the problems identified. The automated evaluation where there is a shortage of human expertise and encourage various kinds of end user and usability expert participation to re-balance the development community for the average users. If traditional OSS development is about scratching a personal itch, usability is about being aware of and concerned about the itches of others. Deeper investigation of the issues outlined in this paper could take various forms. One of the great advantages of OSS development is that its process is to a large extent visible and recorded. A study of the archives of projects will enable a verification of the claims and hypotheses ventured here, as well as the uncovering of a richer understanding of the nature of current usability discussions and development work. Example questions include: “Do certain types of usability issues figure disproportionately in discussions and development effort, leaving others ignored or underdeveloped?”, “What distinguishes OSS projects that are especially innovative in their functionality and interface designs?” and “Can interface design consistency be preserved in the traditional modular OSS development environment?” The approaches outlined in the previous section need further investigation and indeed experimentation to see if they can be feasibly used in OSS projects, without disrupting the factors that make traditional functionality-centric OSS development so effective. These approaches are not necessarily restricted to OSS; several can be applied to proprietary software. Indeed the ideas derived from discount usability engineering and participatory design originated in developing better proprietary software. However, they may be even more appropriate for open source development in that they map well on to the strengths of a volunteer developer community with open discussion. Most HCI research has concentrated on pre-release activities that inform design and relatively little on post-release techniques (Hartson and Castillo, 1998; Smilowitz et al., 1994). It is noteworthy that participatory design is a field in its own right whereas participative usage is usually quickly passed over by HCI textbooks. Thus OSS development in this case need not merely play catch-up with the greater end user focus of the commercial world, but potentially can innovate in exploring how to involve end users in subsequent redesign. There have been several calls in the literature (Shneiderman 2002; Lieberman and Fry, 2001; Fischer, 1998) for users to become more involved in software development beyond standard user-centred design activities (such as usability testing, prototype evaluation and fieldwork observation). It is noticeable that these comments seem to ignore that this involvement is already happening in OSS projects. Raymond (1998) comments that “debugging is parallelizable”, we can add to this that usability reporting, analysis and testing is also parallelisable. However certain aspects of usability design do not appear to be so easily parallelisable. We believe that these issues should be the focus of future research and development, understanding how they have operated in successful projects and designing and testing technological and organisational mechanisms to enhance future parallelisation.Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop; there are many other factors involved, for example the inertia, support, legislation, legacy systems and many more. However improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread. Lieberman and Fry (2001) foresee that ‘interacting with buggy software will be a cooperative problem solving activity of the end user, the system, and the developer.’ For some open source developers this is already true, expanding this situation to (potentially) include all of the end-users of the system would mark a significant change in software development practices. There are many techniques from HCI that can be easily and cheaply adopted by open source developers. Additionally there are several approaches that seem to provide a particularly good fit with a distributed networked community of users and developers. If open source projects can provide a simple framework for users to contribute non-technical information about software to the developers then they can leverage and promote the participatory ethos amongst their users. Raymond (1998) proposed that ‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’ For seeing usability bugs, the traditional open source community may comprise the wrong kind of eyeballs. However it may be that by encouraging greater involvement of usability experts and end users it is the case that: given enough user experience reports all usability issues are shallow. By further engaging typical users into the development process OSS projects can create a networked development community that can do for usability what it has already done for functionality and reliability.

Evaluation:Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved like inertia, support, legislation and legacy systems. I agree to what Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo and to this research paper concluded that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. And also improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop.

Continuing Education and Knowledge Retention: A Comparison of Online and Face-to-Face Deliveries Connie Schardt Duke University Julie Garrison Grand Valley State University

This paper is all about the comparison of online learning and face-to-face learning. In our current situation today it has been said that online learning is more effective than those who still use the old school education which is face-to-face but I hadn’t really found one research that validates the said claim not until I found this research which was posted by my classmate on our discussion thread in research.

Face-to-face discussion also known to us as education 2.0 is a learning style which limits the students learning to the learning of its teachers therefore learning happens in four corners of the classroom. People say that this kind of teaching strategy is obsolete since we are in the age of technology which means sky is the limit. With such claims that stated above I asked myself. If education 2.0 is obsolete then why does almost every teacher that I have known still uses this strategy? Luckily I was able to attend the Philippine youth congress in information technology (y4it 2009) held at the University of the Philippines Diliman campus last September 8-11 2009 and two of the speakers discussed this matters. Mr. Noel Feria discussed the difference of the “obsolete” education 2.0 and education 3.0. He said that education 3.0 is not widely implemented because it has no clear framework yet. He was asked how this education 3.0 works and unfortunately he hasn’t given any clear answer to the question. While the other speaker Prof. Rommel Feria a faculty member of the University of the Philippines Department of Computer Science directly said that “teachers are afraid that their students may surpass them” when asked why education 3.0 is not widely implemented.

Online discussion on the other hand also known as education 3.0 is a learning strategy wherein students are not required to go to school. They are given requirements to be accomplished and given the freedom of how are they going to learn it themselves of course by using the resources that are usually on the net. Teachers do not limit their students to know what they also know. Students may meet their teachers face=to-face only for consultation purposes. Talks about the effectiveness of the online discussion are still on a debate. They said that education 3.0 is more effective than education 2.0 because information nowadays doubles every second and one teacher cannot accommodate all. The main concept of education 3.0 is “search for new knowledge and acquire and share new knowledge in and from your classmates” this may be their way of at list maximizing the knowledge that can be learned. Not limiting the source of knowledge to one person only (the teacher) education 3.0 encourages everyone to search for knowledge and acquire knowledge that their classmate searched in this case everyone is the source of knowledge.

If you try and compare the definitions or overviews given above you’ll most probably say that education 3.0 is more effective over education 2.0 but do you have raw data? Do you have survey result to validate your claims? This study aims to do such thing by comparing the knowledge acquired by those using the education 3.0 and 2.0 or in this paper called DE or distance education and CE for continuing education respectively. The authors have given three assessments namely the Pre-test, Post-test, 6 month Post-test to compare if which of the two educational system is more effective.

This study was designed to determine if there is a difference between learning retention for students taking a continuing education course in the classroom compared to taking the same course through distance education. Students were given three assessments to determine their baseline knowledge of the topic, what they learned immediately after the course, and what they retained six months after the course. Pooled data from those assessments showed that there was no statistical difference in the scores of the two groups of students, leading the authors to conclude that neither delivery method is better than the other.

The result:

Seventy-two professional librarians enrolled in the course during 2004. Fifty-six librarians completed the demographic survey and at least one of the pre- or post-tests. Fourteen librarians completed the course but did not submit any surveys or assessments, despite repeated requests for compliance. Two librarians dropped the course and did not finish the work.

The two groups, continuing education (CE) and distance education (CE), were similar in terms of type of library (academic or hospital) and primary responsibilities (reference or education). The groups differed in terms of age and experience. The CE students were older with more years of experience. All (100%) of the CE students were 36 years old or older, compared to 64% of the distance education students. Eighty two percent of the CE students had 10 years or more of library experience, compared to only 29% of the distance education students. As expected the CE students reported a strong preference (82%) for traditional classroom instruction; while only 61% of distanced education students reported this preference. When asked about reasons for taking an online course, both groups indicated that convenience of not traveling, timeliness of the topic, and working at own pace as the most important factors.Seventeen students from the traditional face-to-face class and 21 students from the distance education course completed the first post-test. As indicated in Figure 1, there was a significant decline in the number of students completing responses to the subsequent tests. Ultimately, data from all assessments were available for only 10 CE and 11 DE students.

When comparing the scores of only those who completed all assessments, the DE students averaged over 10 points higher than the CE group in each test. Both groups showed a significant improvement from the pre-test to the post-test (CE increased by 57%, DE increased by 21%). As expected, average student scores declined from the first post-test to the second post-test (CE decreased by 14%, DE decreased by 11%.), although they remained higher than pre-test levels. Based on the raw numbers, it appeared that students in the DE group came into the classroom with a greater knowledge of the subject and retained more knowledge six months after the course had ended.

Due to the small number of students who completed all assessments, the data from all the participants was re-analyzed and adjusted for missingness . When the data was recalculated using a mixed model, with fixed effects for time (three levels) and group (classroom and distance) and time/group interaction, the adjusted differences were not statistically significant. Considering all the data, the study showed that the distance education group and face-to-face groups had no difference in level of knowledge retention

Considering that one of the articles/posts that caught my attention and made my interest boost up, I have decided to choose Ms. Montejo’s entry which is about “Does Internet Always Intensify Price Competition?” byRajiv Lal, Miklos Sarvary (April 1998) of Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.

Well, I frankly found her post interesting because at one point, I had thought of the concept and idea of employing internet in the business of buy and sell like in eBay and locally, in Davao Sales. I believe it is one concrete example of business done online. The concept of being able to advertise and sell used or brand new items online is a nice idea. It is like an instant auction, an online auction wherein anyone or everyone who is interested can market their products and do business with various clients on the internet. Payments may be in the form of transfer of money from one account to another and purchasing could be in a form of mailing or delivery. Yes we are seeing this as a great thing and of good convenience but surely there are always downsides and upsides in every matter. In this study is the investigation and research of the Internet’s effect on business price competition and the disparate impact of Internet and physical marketing of products. Just like Ms. Montejo mentioned, there is no assurance that many people will go into entering that kind of business and also purchasing products without hesitance in the Internet considering that there are various issues that are to be of great consideration be made. Well, personally, if we examine it thoroughly, there is a great possibility of fraud in this kind of transactions. But this study clearly does not involve the kind of issue, so getting back to the main topic,

Internet might affect the way firms do business in many ways. Taken from the article, the following lines are descriptions of the focus of the study on three key aspects that are likely to have a major impact on distribution. First, we recognize that the Net represents tremendous convenience for consumers in that consumers can cheaply search and compare products and, as a result, have the opportunity to make informed orders without visiting the stores. Second, on the supply side, we recognize that the Internet represents a channel of distribution with a different cost structure. Clearly, if firms manage to replicate the rich store environment on the Internet without having to incur the cost of expensive personnel and retail outlets, then distribution costs might significantly decrease. However, the Internet might not necessarily mean lower distribution costs. This is because retailers are likely to face new costs including, for example, the cost of shipping and handling or the cost associated with returns policies. Thus, in what follows we do not a priori assume that distribution costs are lower on the Internet. Finally, and most importantly, we recognize that the Internet represents an entirely new medium in which the type of information that consumers can acquire differs significantly from that of the traditional retail environment (stores, advertising media, etc.) In particular, we distinguish between two types of product attributes, which we call: “digital” and “non-digital” attributes. We define digital attributes as all product attributes that can be communicated through the Internet.’ The majority of digital attributes are those that can be assessed through visual inspection and that traditionally have been evaluated by consumers in the store. In the context of clothing, for instance, manufacturers always need to update their product lines to reflect recent trends in fashion even for relatively standard items such as jeans, shirts or suites. Similarly, the assortment of produce regularly changes in supermarkets. Such changes in style or assortment can be communicated to consumers through, a Web page. The Web however, also presents an opportunity for enlarging the set of digital attributes, including attributes communicated through sound, for instance. When purchasing CDs consumers can listen to samples from the music of their choice. The second categories of attributes are those that can only be evaluated through physical inspection of the products. In the context of clothing, for instance, texture and fare key product features that can only be explored through physical presence. Other categories where non-digital attributes are important include produce in a supermarket (smell, taste, freshness), wine (taste, color), or flowers (freshness). It is important to note that while non-digital attributes are important for these categories, digital attributes remain critical for product choice. Given this distinction between digital and non-digital attributes, one might quickly conclude that since the conventional wisdom that we challenge is mostly applicable to markets dominated by digital attributes the Internet is less likely to intensify competition in markets dominated by non-digital attributes. The surprise that we offer in this paper is that the Internet reduces price competition resulting in higher prices and profits. Moreover, we show that under some conditions, the Internet reduces customer search. In this way, the real message of the paper is that under some conditions the Internet might represent an opportunity for firms to leverage their brand loyalty and increase their profits. The intuition behind our results is that the Internet allows consumers to evaluate digital attributes easily without visiting the stores. Thus, for digital goods the introduction of the Net results in higher levels of competition. For goods where non-digital attributes are also significant however, the introduction of the Net changes the effective cost of search for customers. While without the Internet the cost of search for consumers is the cost of visiting more than one store, with the introduction of the Net the cost of search becomes the cost of undertaking the entire shopping trip. With higher effective search costs, consumers may not take the risk of searching for products with better non-digital attributes, but instead, remain with the product they are familiar with (Lal and Sarvary, 1998).

Thoroughly, it has been described and identified the key factors that may affect of how the marketing of products in the Internet and physically differs. Two major attributes are defined which clearly is the main basis for comparison and supporting of the study.

Finally, with the study’s result, it showed that the Internet does not always intensify the price competition. Under some conditions the introduction of the Internet leads to higher prices and profits and, therefore, does not intensify price competition.

The main purpose of this paper has been to introduce one context where it is possible to charge higher prices (rather than beat the competition on prices with the help of savings in cost of distribution and sales). The main argument is that although the Internet may make product comparisons easier in some respects, non-digital attributes cannot be communicated through the Net. As the Net allows consumers to save shopping time and effort, it effectively makes it very costly for them to try new products for which the attributes have to be evaluated through physical presence. Hence, under some conditions consumers are relatively better off buying the familiar brand on the Internet rather than trying out the unfamiliar brand in the store. In this way, the Internet allows brands to leverage brand loyalty/familiarity (Lal and Sarvary, 1998).